Different writers are good at different things, and it would be unfair to expect Nick Hornby to write beautifully. His signature is a voice that doesn't sound like writing at all — highly readable, unpretentious on every subject except soul music, rueful about love, electrically funny.

From "Are You Being Served?" and "Keeping Up Appearances" to "Fawlty Towers" and "Absolutely Fabulous," Americans have long appreciated British situation comedy with strong female characters. But the history of the woman-centered Britcom is surprisingly...

Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, unless you have a list of 20 people you need to buy presents for. Then it seems mostly frustrating, tiresome and expensive.
From Nov. 1 until New Year's, stores flood shoppers' email inboxes with...

"Sunday Night Football" elevated NBC to the top of the TV ratings but Fox followed closely behind in the key 18-to-49-year-old demographic with help from an NFL overrun.
The New England Patriots-San Diego Chargers game on NBC notched a rating of 6.1...

The holidays wouldn't be holidays without nostalgia. Center Stage lays it on thickly and quite endearingly with "It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play."
For fans of the 1946 Frank Capra movie, which emerged as a Christmastime tradition decades...

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Chapman University's American Celebration has become over its 15-year run Orange County's premiere charitable gala focused on higher education. The black-tie crowd approaching 1,000 patrons in number represents a legitimate "who's who" of the business and social elite dedicated to the enrichment of life on the Orange Coast.
The goal of American Celebration is the raising of significant funds in support of student scholarships at Chapman University. The cost of higher education has become a staggering...

No other holiday says television like Thanksgiving, which is already three-quarters devoted to sitting on a couch in an insurmountable stupor. Whether it's from the tryptophan, the pie or the beer, from unquestioned custom or, indeed, the psychosomatic effects of television itself, America will be collapsed in front of the tube from coast to coast this weekend.
From the vicarious chill of the early-morning East Coast parade sites, to a game called football I am told is popular, to the official beginning...

Television viewers will see something next month that hasn't been on the air since "I Love Lucy" was in its first run — a new commercial for Smith Bros. cough drops.
Revived last year, the venerable Chicago-based brand is launching a $3 million advertising campaign as it rolls out a new line of cough drops and wellness products to 40,000 retailers across the U.S. and Canada.
Whether that puts Smith Bros. cough drops, an iconic but long-dormant brand, on the tips of consumers' tongues, remains to...

The CBS O&O group is finally developing its ample digital subchannel real estate, partnering with Weigel Broadcasting to launch an outlet devoted to vintage TV and pop culture.
The channel dubbed Decades aims to stand apart from other retro-TV services by offering wrap-around programming designed to highlight the overall theme of the day's program slate. The anchor of this effort will be an hourlong daily program, "Decades Retrospectical," that will examine the news and events of a particular day or...

At 92, Norman Lear belongs to a world-tilting generation of writers that, these days, he has almost all to himself. Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and not many others remain from the great westward migration of talent that began after Sept. 4, 1951, when the first transcontinental coaxial cable made it possible for Angelenos and New Yorkers to laugh at the same joke at the same time. (The Angelenos actually laughed a microsecond sooner; the New Yorkers waited to see if anybody else thought it was funny.)...

There is a promising idea at the heart of "I Love Lucy Live on Stage," the heavy-on-the-nostalgia production at the Hippodrome.
To provide a taste of how the beloved 1950s sitcom about the Ricardos and Mertzes was made, two episodes are re-created on a set designed to conjure up the Hollywood studio where "I Love Lucy" was filmed before a live audience.
Unfortunately, the show, directed by Rick Sparks, applies so much other stuff to milk the remember-when atmosphere that the pace and the fun deflate....